sour dough starter.

As a child, visiting Echo Park was always an adventure. My favorite Aunt and Uncle live just a few blocks off of Sunset down Echo Park Ave. We would always leave for their house early in the day to be sure to return no later than an hour after dark. Sometimes when we would visit we would get dropped off at Elysian Park so we could walk to Dodger Stadium for an afternoon game. But no matter what we would always leave before it got too late.

I never understood it at the time. I was too young and my parents were just being boring. The truth is dad didn't want me and my brother playing outside after the sun went down. In fact my dad didn't want us to even be in the area after dark.

I remember the streets being very scary. There was always sketchy looking characters lurking around the liqueur store on the corner. The neighbors usually had loud unruly music playing and there was always different cars coming and going.

Echo Park is located in the heart of LA and growing up it never had a very good reputation. Gang violence and drug busts were usually the headlines for the area, even the residents were scared. For me and my brother all of this was exciting, we had big imaginations that would be able to fight the bad guys, but for my parents, it was too scary. For a while we didn't visit my favorite aunt and uncle at all. They would have to come visit us.

Now about ten years later, I have returned to the adventurous neighborhood of mystery from my childhood and I've discovered that it's nothing like I remembered it... At all.

The creepy liquor store on the corner has been updated to a cute corner market. The abandoned building that was adjacent to it has been replaced with a bike shop and a very trendy cafe that has outdoor movie showings on Sunday nights.

I wasn't sure what happened. The neighborhood I remembered was long gone.

As I walk through the neighborhood on a sunny afternoon I told a local resident how I was astonished with the change, Ben agreed and said that the transition has been years in the making. He has been living in Echo Park for over 15 years and described how it started with a few new neighbors moving in, and then one house did some renovations, then another. First the cafe, then the market, the bike shop came along with the increase of people 'going green.'

Article after article on how the neighborhood has been slowly making a huge step in a positive direction. A new library was built and more attention was granted to keeping the Lake and surrounding streets clean. The crime rates are slowly dropping and now its safe to stick around until after 8 PM.

I must admit. The neighborhood has lost some of its LA charm. Some of the cafe's and the hipster crowd remind me a little bit of Seattle. But the thing that I've always loved about growing up in Los Angeles is it's diversity and the ability for the mis of cultures to co-exsist. Even though the corner cafe doesn't exactly scream LA the paletero man still walks the streets selling ice cream after school and the vibrant murals still line the buildings, they just aren't covered with gang tags anymore.